Chapter 33 #2
I’m not quick enough to hide it when Flora comes clattering into the kitchen.
She’s a bit chaotic, I’ve found. It probably comes from never having had to do anything for herself up until this point in life.
Chaotic but lovely. Not all of us have had to grow up early, and I’m glad she hasn’t had to.
She gasps as she spots my face—she’s perceptive, too—and marches over, throwing her gorgeous green Goyard tote bag on the table so she can gather me up in her arms. I bought the twins Primark dupes of that bag for their birthdays—they’d die if they saw Flora’s real one.
‘Oh, no!’ she says when she spots what I’m looking at. ‘No, don’t look at that. Shit, I thought I’d chucked that.’ She stands behind me and wraps her arms around me.
I sniff hard, because this is ridiculous. It’s embarrassing. ‘You did. I fished it out of the bin like a total loser. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. And she just looks so fucking pleased with herself.’
I spit the last bit out, and it sounds so bitchy.
I pride myself on not being bitchy in general, because everyone has their own shit to deal with and no one needs my judgement, but it’s really hard to stop it when it comes to Selena Wentworth.
Of course she looks pleased with herself.
She’s getting the whole bloody fairytale.
But Flora laughs against my ear, which helps. She’s still hugging me. ‘You’re not wrong. I wonder if she removed the stick from her arse for the shoot?’
I brush my fingers over the photo. Yeah, I’m still fixated on the orangery picture. ‘When did they shoot it?’
‘July, I think? June? Sometime in the summer. It was bloody hot. They had to avoid shooting against the windows because everything was in full bloom.’
I comfort myself with the thought that it must have been stifling in the orangery at that time of year. It was warm enough earlier this month when Xav and I fooled around. ‘It must have been a big operation.’
‘Huge. Ma was tearing her hair out. But she loves Selena, so she put up with it.’
That stings, because the duchess barely tolerated me that weekend and downright hates me now, but it’s not exactly a surprise. After all, she’s besties with Selena’s mum. She literally handpicked her for her precious firstborn.
‘If it’s any consolation,’ Flora says, releasing me and coming to stand next to me, ‘none of it will make her happy. Selena, I mean. Or Slinky, as Ben insists on calling her. It drives Xav mad.’
I blink up at her. ‘What do you mean, it won’t make her happy? Because she’s not in love with him?’ Saying the L-word about Xav makes me feel all tingly and weird in my tummy.
‘Well, that, obviously, but it’s just not how she’s wired.
I’m sure she looks pleased with herself there because this is a new milestone for her, right?
She’s on the front of a national magazine in her future home, wearing couture and surrounded by all her merch, and my brother, obvs.
It’s another box ticked. But now that that’s done, she’ll want more.
’ She pauses and screws up her face. ‘It’s not that she’s greedy—I mean, she’s fairly materialistic, obviously, as am I.
It’s more that she’s seriously hard on herself.
What’s next? What’s bigger? What’s the next mountain to climb? ’
I glance back down and try very hard to zone out my beautiful Xavier as I study Selena.
She definitely looks intimidating. Ice-queen-level intimidating.
I wonder if Flora’s view of her is right.
Can she seriously not be happy with her lot in life after bagging Xav, of all people?
Even if she’s not in love with him, she’ll end up as mistress of Belvedere.
Surely that’s hashtag-endgame, even for her?
Girl needs to touch some grass and listen to ‘Wi$h Li$t’ more often. Some people are so fucking ungrateful.
Dawn had this thing of wittering on constantly, especially at me, about the power of reading. A superpower, she called it.
'You didn't get your A-levels, but you can still build your superpower,' she'd always say.
Spoken like a true librarian.
She went to some librarian conference a few years ago, before she got sick, and there was a speaker that really stuck with her.
They said that we’d see the emergence of a ‘thinking class’ and that everyone else would be stuck in some mindless ‘scrolling class’ while the thinking class made all the decisions and enjoyed all the success.
She made them sound like the humans in WALL-E who floated around all day with a screen stuck in front of their faces, which was a pretty good incentive not to end up there, to be honest.
‘I worry that your sisters will end up as part of the scrolling class,’ she’d say. ‘I worry about that a lot. But I don't think you will, Ivy, because no matter how dismissive you are of the education you’ve had, you have an old soul and an enquiring brain. I know you can do better.’
I'm pretty sure she didn’t mean sex worker or caff server when she said better.
She had started on me early. As soon as she got together with Dad, really. And when I was twelve she pronounced me ready for my Daphne du Maurier era. I jumped in with Jamaica Inn and ate it up, but when she put Rebecca into my hands, I pushed back hard.
‘It’s so boring,’ I remember moaning at her. ‘It’s all just descriptions.’ Sure, I got that the first line was supposed to be iconic, but after that it was just page after page going on about rhododendrons and the like. I couldn’t get past that first chapter.
Do you know what my ever-practical stepmum did?
She told me to skip ahead to chapter two, and just like that, I fell in love.
I think I’ve read Rebecca every year of my life since then, and I’ve never bothered to read the first chapter. Blasphemous? Maybe, but Dawn has always been… irreverent about books. For a book lover, she’s the furthest thing from an intellectual snob you can get.
Chatting with her about books is one of the things I miss the most. We have different tastes—she enjoys a good old domestic thriller and I’m a romance girlie—but we loved telling each other about our current reads, all the same.
I read thrillers and cosy mysteries to her now when I go in to see her, but, though the reading seems to soothe her, the books don’t make their way through all the nasty, gnarly branches of her dementia.
Anyway, the reason I’m thinking about all this is because last night, after seeing that magazine, I had the most fucked-up dream that I was the narrator in Rebecca.
(I like to imagine that her name is Daphne, just like her creator, although my younger self used to rabbit-hole on the most romantic, unusual names possible for her, like Aurelia or Elowen or Viola.) I was at Manderley, only it was actually Belvedere, and I was all dressed up as Caroline de Winter while searching desperately for Xav.
But when I looked up at the big oil portrait hanging over the main staircase at Belvedere, it wasn’t Caroline de Winter at all, but Selena Wentworth in that same crimson dress from the magazine spread.
Next thing I knew, she materialised on the top step, gave me a smile so smug it honestly bordered on evil, whispered, ‘He’s mine,’ and pushed me down the fucking stairs.